


can't cheat an honest man

by Veridique



Series: fragile soft machines [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Asexual Jester Lavorre, Campaign 2 (Critical Role), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 01:41:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veridique/pseuds/Veridique
Summary: It’s not a challenge—the Nein aren’t hard to love. Some of them resist at first, but she finds unique ways to love them each as she comes to know them. She loves Beau for her fearlessness, Nott for her enthusiasm, Yasha for her strength that goes deeper than her sword and her solid arms. She loves Caleb for his quiet wit and Molly for his charismatic warmth. And she loves Fjord……she loves Fjord. A complete sentence.





	can't cheat an honest man

Jester has high standards for love stories.

She adores them. She adores the romance, the tension of will-they-won’t-they, the swelling of feelings as one person finally can’t hold their heart back from pouring out everything they’ve been hiding.

But she gets disappointed by them often.

Because often, the beautiful pining and the beautiful longing and finally the beautifully requited love get overshadowed by other things. Things that are still beautiful, she supposes, but beautiful in a different way.

All Jester wants is to read a wonderful story about true love conquering all, the kind her mama used to read to her when she was growing up, nestled in her bed in between the walls that surrounded her whole world.

The kind where the knight rescues the princess from the high tower. The kind where the fine lady falls in love with the dirty street urchin. The kind where two friends are helplessly smitten with one another but neither has the courage to say it.

Jester loves love. She loves the kind of love you can get lost in, the kind of love that spins you round and round like a leaf in a whirlpool until you don’t know which way is up and you don’t care. The kind of love that you can count on, that’s so omnipresent you don’t even realize it’s there until it’s gone.

Her mother loves her like that. The Traveler does, too. She wouldn’t have formed a bond with a god that loved her any less. 

For years, they were her only family.

But now she has more family, a big one, filled with people from all over the continent. And she’s determined to love her new family with the same kind of love that she grew up with.

It’s not a challenge—the Nein aren’t hard to love. Some of them resist at first, but she finds unique ways to love them each as she comes to know them. She loves Beau for her fearlessness, Nott for her enthusiasm, Yasha for her strength that goes deeper than her sword and her solid arms. She loves Caleb for his quiet wit and Molly for his charismatic warmth. And she loves Fjord…

…she loves Fjord. A complete sentence. 

Even as she takes time to get to know each of the others and learn how to love them, she loves Fjord from the beginning. He’s easy to love, effortless, even, and she doesn’t think she could stop loving him if she tried.

He doesn’t shy away from her hugs, her casual touches. Touch is how she lets people know she’s there, that she’s going to take care of them, whether it’s with a healing spell or a simple pat on the back. And Fjord is one of the only people besides her mother who’s never hesitated to accept her embrace. 

He lets her braid his hair one night, and when she’s done, his sincere “Thanks, Jester,” fills her core with a song that she’s never heard before but has known all her life. 

It’s the song that plays in the margins of love stories, right at the critical moment: the moment when one person realizes they’re in love.

But the aftermath of that moment is typically the kind of thing that Jester dismisses. If she wrote love stories, sex would have no place in them.

Because sex has nothing to do with love. Sex is a tool that people use to get what they want. She’s seen her mother’s clients, the ridiculous lengths they’ll go to for the smallest favor from a woman they’ll never truly know, all for this mysterious beast called _sex appeal._

It’s a con, no different than three-card Monty or the fiddle game. And Jester has been in on the grift since she could walk and talk.

She’s never tried to pull it off herself. Could she, if she tried? Maybe. But she sees no reason to.

She doesn’t want for much—she can make a living off adventuring and odd jobs just as easily as her mother can from playing to the fantasies of her marks. Perhaps some people play the game because love is the ante, the love that they crave like a fish on a deck craves water. But Jester doesn’t need to go through all that for love. Her family loves her, and she knows it, and that’s more than enough for her.

But there’s something more that she’s longing for, something her heart calls out for in a language that she can’t quite understand. She feels a prickle in her stomach when she sees other people looking at Fjord the way clients used to look at her mother, with a hunger in their eyes that turns Fjord’s body into nothing but a piece of meat, a prize to be won.

She doesn’t know if Fjord is in on it, too, if he knows the power that he has to get anything he wants from these people who have fallen to the oldest trick in the book.

If he does know it, he doesn’t seem to care. His deep voice and kind smile are his weapons, even more so than his falchion, and he can usually get what he wants with them. And the few times someone misunderstands him, thinks he’s offering them a chance to play the rigged game, Fjord seems uncomfortable. 

It’s because he’s a good man, she decides. He doesn’t want to cheat anyone (well, anyone who doesn’t deserve it). He’d rather get what he needs from honest negotiation than from running a grift.

And that’s part of why she loves him, isn’t it? She’s met so many people who just _want_ without a thought to the consequences that she can’t help but admire this good man, this honest man, this kind and gentle and flawed and flawless man.

She could probably pull off the con, if she wanted.

But she couldn’t con this man.

And she couldn’t want to.

**Author's Note:**

> Who could have guessed that my quick fic about Fjord pining would turn into my first series?
> 
> Comments light up my days. Thanks for reading!


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